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Z is well preserved

I’ve started a piece of bacon, which we’re looking forward to immensely. You make a mixture of salt, sugar, spices, herbs, a little saltpetre and rub it into the pork, put it in the fridge and rub it in again for several days, then wash it thoroughly, hang it in a cool place to dry out, then bingo. Before hanging it up, I take the skin off and cut it into snippets and roast them and they are the most fabulous pork scratchings.

We started the first jar of damson chutney today and it’s very good – quite rich, you don’t need much – and also opened a jar of pickled onions, a couple of weeks before we’re supposed to but they’re good already and presumably will get even better.

And I’ve harvested the last of the tomatoes and all of the jalapeño peppers, so relish is on the cards for later this week. The freezer is full, we have to do something else with the crop and the relish is fabulous.

I’ve come to the conclusion that growing very hot chillies isn’t worth it. You get so many, especially of the tiny ones, and they’re actually too hot to eat. When a single little pepper zings an entire stew, and it’s impossible to eat unless massively diluted, yet you have hundreds of them, their use is very limited. If you have jalapeño or perhaps Cayenne at the most, you can deal with them. All the same, we’ve still got plenty of dried Cayenne peppers left from last year. But the spicy, less extremely hot jalapeños are so useful that they can be put in all sorts of dishes, one can be cut up into a masala omelette or a bean salad or a stew (maybe two) and a delicious relish can be made, then that’s a valuable pepper.

I went down to the local coal merchant this afternoon to enquire about a delivery of smokeless fuel. Yes, it should have been organised back in the summer, but it wasn’t. And I discovered that it’s cheaper to buy a bag at a time than to have a tonne delivered. So I bought four bags, which is a couple of hundredweight (I deal equally with Imperial and Metric) – two each for Rose and for us – and we can go along and get more every two or three weeks. Which makes life easier really and it’s only a mile down the road.

They crop really well, even in relatively small pots, but they’re better in a greenhouse here as the weather is unlikely to get hot enough. I only leave the seeds in if I really want it spicy! I’ll me making the relish tomorrow, I will be wearing those gloves 🙂

The Unobservant Eye of Z

Dramatis personae:
My husband, Lovely Tim or LT for short (though he is actually tall).
My late husband, the Sage, aka Russell.
My children: Dearest daughter Weeza, who has London Ways, is married to Phil. Their daughter is Zerlina Buttercup and their son is Augustus Bufo. Elder son - Al X, is married to Dilly. Their children are Squiffany Virgilia, Maximus Pugsley and Hadrian Swallow. Younger son - Ro married to Dora and their two-year-old is Rufus Russell.
Big Sister: Wink. She lives in Wiltshire, 230 miles away, but we're much closer than that.
We live with our cat Eloise, a black tortoiseshell half-Ragdoll.
Bantams live in the garden and cats live in the barns but we feed them and they have ambitions to be pets too. In addition, cows come to visit in the summer. Mostly, they stay in the fields. None of them has got a hoof in the door yet.
There is an annexe to the house, where Roses lives and her beloved, Lawrence, spends a lot of time there. Her son, Boy, lives there too.

Z’s blogroll

Updating takes too much memory, sorry - but then I'm not very young any more, so am hanging on to the memory I've got. Please don't look for any significance in the order - I'm not drunk but I am disorderly.

In case we are nostalgic

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Copyright

Oh, what's the problem? This is hardly Great Literature. I'd appreciate anything taken from here being acknowledged, and I might change my mind if I'm suddenly proclaimed as the Literary Queen of the Blogosphere - but I probably wouldn't. Do what you like, just as long as it doesn't extend to defamation of anyone, even me.

Actually, you want to pass off what I say as your own, I might even be flattered. Let's face it, who cares anyway?